"The Supreme Court's ruling in the Citizens United case opened the floodgates for corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money trying to influence the midterm congressional elections in November. Campaign reporters Josh Israel, Aaron Mehta, and Peter Stone, with the help of the Sunlight Foundation's Campaign Ad Monitor, are mobilizing the Center's supporters to detect in real time examples of political dirty tricks, corporate ads, persuasive 'push' polls, pre-recorded phone messages -- 'robo calls,' and efforts to discourage voters from showing up at the polls."

This idea could have potential for newsrooms that want to learn how to engage the public in elections. No doubt, however, a website would have to build in considerable fact-checking and truth testing features for such an effort.

To find out more about the project, I asked Randy Barrett, director of communications for the Center for Public Integrity, about it:

Al Tompkins: How successful has crowdsourcing been as a journalism tool for your past projects?

Randy Barrett: We've tried a few small exercises in crowdsourcing in the past, most notably with our "Transportation Lobby" project. None of them were real successes; we'd get a few responses, but nothing major. But we also didn't do a great job of advertising and pushing those aspects of the projects. Probably the most successful crowdsourcing attempt was with our "Campus Assault" project, which used a survey of schools to gather data before the project started.

How reliable has crowdsourcing been? What fact-checking are you doing before posting?

Barrett: Because of how limited our attempts have been in the past, we can't really comment on how reliable it's been. We haven't had a problem, as far as I know. We plan to vet more thoroughly for this project, which really is our first true crowdsourcing push that I can remember.

What are you most interested in for this project?

Barrett: We're really hoping to get some robocalls from outside groups; these are notoriously hard to track because someone has to record it and send it in. But with the spreading of technology, it's a lot easier to do that now than it was even two years ago, let alone in the 2006 congressional elections. Robocalls and push polls are where the real nasty, insidious stuff can come out, stuff that people won't put in a television ad. If we can get some of those, that would be great.

Why are you so interested in ads that are corporate or union backed?

Barrett: Our focus on the project is outside groups, not campaign ads. Those are tracked pretty closely and, with few exceptions, all tend to be middle of the road. Outside groups are the ones that come in swinging dirt the most, and we're interested in that. Also, our focus this year has spent a lot of time on what the post-Citizens United world of campaign finance will be like. One of the expected results is that outside groups will be spending more and be able to hide who's funding them in a better way than they used to. That's who we're interested in.

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AUTHOR INFORMATION

Al Tompkins is one of America's most requested broadcast journalism and multimedia teachers and coaches. After nearly 30 years working as a reporter, photojournalist, producer, investigative reporter, head of special investigations and News Director, Tompkins joined the Poynter Institute where he is Senior Faculty for Broadcast and Online. He is the author of "Aim for the Heart" a textbook about multimedia storytelling that has been adopted by more than 100 universities worldwide. He has taught in 49 states, Canada, Egypt, Denmark, South Africa, Iceland and the Caymans.
Tompkins is the recipient of some of journalism's highest awards including The National Emmy, the Japan Prize, The American Bar Association's Silver Gavel, The Peabody (group award), 7 National Headliner Awards, The Robert F. Kennedy Award and The Iris Award. He was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame and honored with The Governor's Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Tompkins helped to author the national codes of ethics for both the National Press Photographers Association and the Radio and Television Digital News Association.